Should we celebrate or fear the “Muslim vote”? The success of independent candidates running on pro-Palestinian tickets, four of whom were elected, overturning huge Labour majorities, has led to a debate about the role of Muslims in British politics.
On the one side are radical Islamic groups, including the Muslim Vote (TMV), a coalition of organisations seeking to maximise Muslim electoral impact. “Through the grace of the Almighty,” it proclaimed after the election, Muslims had sent “the main political parties a message” that “in Muslim-heavy areas your majorities will be under threat”.
On the other side are those who fear the rise of “sectarian voting”. Jake Wallis Simons, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle and a Daily Telegraph columnist, saw in the “sectarian insurgency” of TMV and the pro-Palestinian independents a “glimpse into a horrifying future” in which elections are “dominated by hostile sectarianism”.
Whether employed in celebration or denunciation, the concept of the “Muslim vote” is dubious. The election showed the continuing convergence of white and ethnic minority voting patterns. Minority groups, which historically have favoured Labour, were more diverse than ever in their political choices.
What about Muslims? A Savanta poll for the online Muslim magazine Hyphen suggested that 44% of Muslims placed the Gaza conflict as one of the five most important issues, compared with 12% of the general public. Muslims, though, are not one-issue voters. Four of their top five priorities in the election were the same as that of all voters – the NHS, the cost of living, the economy and housing.
The poll showed, too, that support for Labour among Muslims had fallen by a quarter since 2019, though almost two-thirds were still willing to vote for the party. The psephologist Lewis Baston calculates that in the 21 seats where more than 30% of the population is Muslim, Labour’s vote share has in the past five years plummeted from 65% to 36%. Nevertheless, 17 of the 21 constituencies remain Labour, though with much reduced majorities. According to YouGov, the favourability rating of Keir Starmer among those of Pakistani or Bangladeshi heritage is half that among other minority groups.
What these sometimes contradictory figures reveal is both the strength of feeling about Gaza and the degree of political division among Muslims. One aspect of the the “Muslim vote”, though, is often ignored: the significance of class. Muslim voters are predominantly working class and live in some of the country’s most deprived constituencies. It is also in the most deprived constituencies that, in an election that ensured a Labour landslide, there was the greatest swing away from Labour. The concerns of working-class Muslims echo those of white working-class voters supporting Brexit or Reform – a sense of being abandoned, even betrayed, by mainstream parties and institutions.
“We would hear real frustration over Labour on Gaza,” Luke Tryl, of the organisation More in Common, observed of focus groups with Muslim voters, “but very quickly it would come back to a broader point that Labour took Muslim votes for granted and that their communities had been neglected”, an attitude “similar to what you’d hear in the red wall post referendum”. As one Muslim respondent in a focus group put it, “There’s no point in you tackling world peace when the area you live in is a s**t hole”.
Gaza is an important issue for such voters. It is also a lightning rod for a wider sense of disaffection. As with many white working-class voters, the failure of mainstream parties, especially Labour, to address seriously their concerns has allowed those pushing identitarian grievances to shape that disaffection.
All of which leads to the question of “sectarianism”. It is an important issue that urgently needs addressing. Yet, much of the debate misses the essential points and gives the impression that sectarianism matters only when incubated within Muslim communities. Muslim sectarianism is neither new nor simply imported from abroad. In large part, its roots lie in the Salman Rushdie affair, and the attempts to ban his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which helped shape Muslim identity politics and allowed Islamism to establish itself in this country.
Many of the organisations within TMV have Islamist roots, such as the Muslim Association of Britain with its links to the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim Engagement and Development (MEND). Leading figures in the campaign have expressed support for Hamas and for hostage taking, and spewed antisemitism.
This bigotry needs confronting, as does religious sectarianism masquerading as political cause. What is not sectarian, though, is believing in the political significance of Gaza, opposing Israel’s assault, demanding a ceasefire, supporting Palestinian freedom. Conflating political support for Palestine with religious sectarianism mirrors the arguments of Islamists, casts solidarity as illegitimate and distorts the meaning of sectarianism, weakening the battle against it.
There is an implication, too, that only Muslims care about Gaza and that this cuts against their domestic concerns and loyalties. In fact, Muslim identitarianism can only be understood in a wider context.
A recent report for the Institute for Jewish Policy Research (JPR) on “Jews in the UK today” found that around three-quarters of British Jews feel “attached” to Israel, and almost two-thirds identify as Zionists. Israel’s internal and external policies, observed Jonathan Boyd, the executive director of JPR, “inevitably shape and inform the nature of their Jewishness.”
British Jews do not possess a singular identity, nor a singular view of Israel. Nevertheless, for the majority, their identity is inextricably linked to that of the state of Israel and this frames their response to the Gaza conflict. The “scale and barbarity of the Hamas attacks on 7 October”, Boyd noted, “has compelled many to… acknowledge just how fundamental Israel is” to their sense of being.
For many Muslims, too, their identity is shaped in part by the Palestinian struggle. They, too, feel distraught about Israeli attacks on schools, hospitals and civilians. This, though, gets labelled “sectarian”.
Attitudes to the Gaza conflict – or to any political issue – should be defined not by the boundaries of identity but by political and moral reasoning. Nor should those boundaries delineate the forms of identity politics we are willing to challenge and those we are happy to accommodate. There may be no such thing as the “Muslim vote”, but the debate around it reveals both the strength of identitarian politics and the skewed fashion in which many think about it.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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